Disclosure

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Educeri (A Homeschool Crew Review)

If there's one thing that I really enjoy, it's having access to online services where I have lessons and handouts already prepped and ready to teach. I really do stink at trying to throw together my own lesson plans and I do so much better when I'm told what to do and how to do it than trying to plan it out myself. So I was pretty excited when I was given access to more than 1000 Ready to Teach lessons with a 12 month subscription to Educeri Lesson Subscription Service from Educeri ....... Educeri a division of DataWORKS .

About Educeri

Educeri is an online subscription service offering a large variety of lesson plans for a large range of subjects created for teachers by other teachers for grades K-12.

Using Educeri is very easy. Simply browse the available lessons, which can be sorted by grade or

Summary Page

by subject and select the topic that you wish to teach. You are then brought to a summery page that gives a brief description as to what will be covered by the lesson. There is also a comments page on the summary page where you can read comments left by other users in regards to the lesson (if there has been any left) or you can leave your own.

This summary page will also list if any additional resources are available for the lesson, such as quizzes or handouts. Also listed are what recommended browsers would work best for viewing the lesson.

By clicking the "Teach Lesson" button, you are then brought to a simple but effective slideshow style lesson that walks you through teaching the lesson. Lessons are completely laid out for, including a script to help you instruct the students properly through the given concept. CFU questions are given to use to check the students understanding on each section of the lesson as well as a breakdown of vocabulary and speaking points that might be used to really help illustrate the topic.

Periodic Reviews are also given on adjacent slides to reiterate the previous slides points and to make sure of student comprehension before moving on to the next topic of discussion.

Printable PDF files are available for most lessons which allows students to follow along with a paper in front of them as well as to record the answers to questions asked through the lesson. Each lesson seems to have 3-4 handouts that accompany the lesson, and some lessons also have printable quizzes.

This is not a program that you can just sit your students in front of and allow them to work independently. This is far from passive and does require time and effort from the "teacher". But it is nice to have the entire lesson plan laid out, along with speaking points, ready to go, just print the handouts and quizzes, load the lesson and get started.

My really big complaint about this subscription is that the math lessons are all common core aligned. While not an absolute deal breaker for me, I prefer to avoid common core teaching, especially when it comes to mathematics (I tend to be a bit more lenient with language arts or science). For this reason, we used more of the Language Arts lessons than we did anything else.

A secondary complaint is lack of content for younger grades. While there were tons of math and language arts lessons for 2nd and 3rd grade, there were absolutely no lessons available for either grade in any of the other subjects. This limited our ability to use the subscription service as there just wasn't anything beyond the math/English we could use.

Overall, I really like the concept of having full lesson plans laid out for me to just run with. But the limited selections and the common core alignment just really limited what I wanted to use. I do have a list of language arts and a few math lessons I plan to use, but I would like to see much more added to the other subjects to include the younger grades.

To learn more about Educeri and their subscription service, please visit their website or any of their social media sites at: